Jean Arp was a founder of the Dada movement, an anti-bourgeois approach to art and literature that developed in Switzerland during World War I (1914–1918). Dadaist manifestos condemned academic conventions and encouraged innovation, collaboration, and spontaneity. One of Arp’s distinctive contributions was the development of an “object language” that consisted of irregular and subtly contoured shapes evocative of familiar objects such as leaves, clouds, bottles, frogs, and generalized elements of the human body. He arranged these shapes so that they flowed into one another, melding and confusing their meanings and appearing to emerge from the subconscious mind. In Configuration, the central motif resembles lips or a moustache floating below a single oval eye. The construction is itself ambivalent: framed and painted like a two-dimensional canvas, but with a sculptural relief surface created by cut out and glued layers of wood.